I stared at him, trying to imagine what he might’ve been like in another place and time. “What did you do?”
“I grabbed my dad’s shotgun and shot the damned thing.” He waved his hand as if it wasn’t a big deal. “Shortly after that, my mom started to grow poppies. I didn’t even make the connection between the poppies and not being able to leave until you said something about it. Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have left my house after that.”
“That was the first house, wasn’t it? Your family’s house? But you did leave it.”
“Not of my own free will, I didn’t.”
“Was your mom a witch?”
“She was just…a mom. No atern, none of us. We knew about witches and the Isa fae, but we didn’t talk about it much. Other witches lived in that forest, too, but they didn’t have aterns either, so we blended in. But that bear…” He shook his head, his eyes distant as if peering closer at the memory. “Now I’m not so sure it was a bear.”
“Fae,” I spat. “Looking for humans that aren’t supposed to exist.”
“A few years later, a witch came by, female, with an atern, but she left quickly. After that, weird painful memories of a tattoo.”
“Then your second house. And Daphne.”
He nodded. “And then this house. Which leads me to my second thing I was going to tell you in a roundabout way.”
“That was like twenty things.” I flexed my foot underneath his hands because he’d stopped massaging my toes.
“Like I said, I’m not stingy.” He grinned, and both it and his renewed foot rub spiked my heartbeat. “Free will. I don’t think I have to explain how much of a fan I am of it.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Okay…” This conversation had taken a sharp turn.
“If you cured me of Daphne’s curse, then maybe we could…try to untie the Legacy knot.”
The full meaning of his words could’ve knocked me over if I’d have been standing. Good thing I didn’t have a mouthful of wine or I would’ve choked on it. “Sex. With me.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Free will. Only if you want to.”
Hadn’t I already made it clear with my awkward seduction that I did want to? Nothing had changed, especially when he looked at me like that, as if I really was something extraordinary. I glanced at the straw he’d made me on the coffee table, its zigzags a perfect representation of riotous glee and crippling doubt that I would disappoint him without the use of my hands. Or worse, disappoint him period. I’d only had sex one time before, and it had been messy, sloppy, and not with someone who had thoroughly revived my dead, frozen heart. And that had been with the use of my hands. Of course, none of that would matter if the curse wasn’t broken, and we both dropped dead.
“Hadley,” he said softly. “I want to. Try, I mean. With you. If you want.”
“I…I don’t even know if I lifted the curse.”
“There are 673 sex curses and their cures on the Isa fae databases.” He pointed to Nasty. “I looked while you were in the bathtub.”
“And if the one Daphne used isn’t one of those 673 sex curses?”
He took his hand from my foot, taking his warmth with it, and propped his arm on the couch cushion. “Don’t you want to at least try? To end fae power for the future of all witches?”
More than almost anything. I stared into the crackling flames across the living room with the obvious answer perched on my tongue. I swallowed it back as I looked once again at him with the backs of my eyes burning. “I don’t want to hurt you, Kason. If I didn’t break the curse… If I can’t break the curse, then…”
He smiled. “You won’t hurt me.”
“Well, if you’re dead, it won’t matter.” My chin wobbled, so I clenched my teeth to hide it, but I knew he’d already seen it. My emotions were so much easier to control when I just had one—rage. Now I had a whole tangle of them on full display.
He placed his hand on my knee as he scooted himself closer underneath my legs, his eyes tender, his touch gentle. “You won’t hurt me. I promise I won’t hurt you either. We’ll break those 673 curses and then just see, very slowly. Now, don’t get mad, but…are you a virgin?”
“I’m not. Surprised?”
He shook his head, his mouth cocked in a strange smile. “One thing I’ve learned about you is that you take what you want.”
“Or someone else will.” I gazed down at his hand on my knee, giant compared to my spindly leg, but looking as if it belonged there. “Are you a virgin?”
He shrugged. “There were a couple girls when I was in school.”
“At the same time or…?” It wasn’t until it was out of my mouth that I realized how much of a fucking idiot I was. What an embarrassing realization to have right then.
He laughed, the bass sound of it vibrating a lightness up through my chest. “No. Not at the same time. And just so you know, I have protection. I have a lot of protection. Pretty sure those who put me in these houses knew exactly how to untie the Legacy knot.”
Like Dad, who’d probably been borrowing poke root from Mom’s indoor garden to track Kason and who’d wanted me to find him. Which meant I had to do whatever it took—maybe even death—to carry on his legacy.
I heaved a slow breath. “Okay.”
Kason nodded, his focus aimed at his fingers skimming partway up the inside of my thigh. “Nervous?”
A delicious heat streaked from his fingertips and pooled in my center. My leg, still bent over his lap, twitched, bringing his gaze back to mine. The hunger that blazed in his dark eyes swept a throbbing inferno through my body.
“Of course not,” I breathed.
“Good.” He leaned in slowly, the hand on the inside of my thigh sliding up over my hip, his face hovering over mine. His gaze dropped to my mouth before skimming the rest of my face. He feathered his lips across mine. Quick, sweet, and effective enough to sweep the air from my lungs. His warm breath tickled over my cheek, and I smiled into it as if drunk on his touch. He grazed his fingertips up past my chin and smiled with me, then kissed me again. His hand slid through my hair to the back of my neck, his mouth harder, rougher. He parted my lips with his tongue, and my whole body felt his kiss.
With a gasp, I placed my hands against his chest, and thankfully he didn’t take that as a sign that I was pushing him away. He leaned me back into the pillows on the edge of the couch, ridding my lap of Nasty while wedging his long, lean body between my legs, never once breaking the kiss.
My body melted underneath his weight and begged to take over to silence the niggling doubts at the back of my mind. I writhed with his touch, pulsing a brilliant throb to my center, and my hips lifted to rub against the bulge in his jeans.
His hand snaked under my sweater, up over my ribs, and the skin-to-skin contact scorched me to the edge of a loud moan. His fingers traced the curve of my breast then worked their way underneath my bra. When he dragged his thumb over my nipple, I threw back my head at the intense need raging through my body. But my urgency for him was nowhere near his. Every touch shook him with excitement. He wanted me. And only me. Which was why we had to do this right.
“Six hundred… Six hundred seventy-three sex curses,” I said between kisses.
“We’re just kissing.” He hiked my thigh up around his hip, squeezing the roundness of my ass as he groaned into my mouth. His shifted position brought him even closer, all hard muscle and vibrating need, his hand cupping my breast, his hips grinding against my eager thrusts. “Fuck, Hadley.”
No. No, we weren’t just kissing. We might as well have been fucking with our clothes on, but if we had sex, I was sure to implode. If we didn’t die first.
“Kason, stop.”
He jerked back, his eyes fevered and his shoulders heaving. “Right. Sorry.” He climbed off of me and sat on the far side of the couch with his elbows on his spread knees and his head in his hands.
Part of me had to wonder, even though I knew it was trivial, if he’d agreed to have sex with me only
because he thought I could lift the curse if it wasn’t already. Not because he cared about me or the future of the world’s witches but because he was desperate to fuck. It wasn’t fair to blame him, but if I’d been any other “extraordinary” witch, would that have mattered? It shouldn’t. The only thing that mattered was untying the Legacy knot, but somehow my heart had looped itself there, too. I didn’t just want to be a fuck buddy. I wanted so much more.
Both of us sat there catching our breaths while my heart broke and hammered for Kason at the same time.
But there was another sound too. Footsteps.
I whipped around to stare at Kason who jerked his head out of his hands at the same time, his eyes wide. Dread gathered at the nape of my neck as I slowly turned to peer over the back of the couch. Nothing.
Kason stood, his body a mass of coiled tension. I willed the roar of blood between my ears to be quiet. Where had the footsteps come from? Not inside this magic-fortified house. But not from outside either, not through the thick front door and over the howling wind. No way. But no way we’d both dreamed it either.
More footsteps, a soft, clipped step-step.
Terror stormed my body with a winter chill. Someone was inside the house. But not just someone, because the clipped tempo of the black pointed shoes with the gold-plated toes was all too familiar.
Kason’s gaze darted toward mine.
I tried to speak, but all that fell out was a choppy exhale.
Determination set his jaw as he stalked around the couch in the direction of the front door hallway. I scrambled after him since I was the one with magic. All twenty-three clicks of it. Twenty-two if I wanted to live.
My quick breaths sliced through the house, so I pushed my lips together. Silence. I stopped in the front door hallway, flicking my gaze from Kason creeping open the closet door to the darkened kitchen. Swallowing thickly, I crept toward it. A chill crawled goosebumps over my skin.
Footsteps padded to my left. I whipped around.
Kason stopped, his hands raised, his dark gaze ticking from me to the kitchen.
“Stay,” I hissed.
“No hablo ingles,” he hissed back.
No time to argue. I slinked to the kitchen, my teeth slammed together to keep them from chattering, to keep from screaming. Blindly, I ran my elbow against the wall, searching for the light switch.
Glass clinked in the darkness. A rush of gurgling air like the last of wine up into a straw.
Metal clicked loudly against metal behind me. I jumped. Kason moved to my side, his shotgun at the ready, his gaze dark and lethal. He flipped the light switch on.
The sudden brightness threw spots across my eyes as I looked everywhere at once for the intruder. But all I saw was the vase of poppies tipped on its side. The same poppies I’d tried to throw away again and again, but had stubbornly sprang back into existence on the tabletop. Always right-side up, never knocked over.
A sinking stone weighted my body even though I didn’t know exactly what it meant.
A slight odor permeated the air. Rotten fish, but faded, barely there. Fae.
A single footstep came toward us. And another. My family’s killer. It had to be. But there was nothing there. Invisible, like I’d been while at Dimic’s Everlasting Ink.
Kason leveled his shotgun, the tendons in his neck straining. “Who’s there?”
“Revel,” I said, my voice shaky. But the reveal spell gurgled into nothingness, as if sucked away by an immediate counter spell. “Prohib.” But the presence kept coming right for me.
I held my breath as an arctic breeze touched my shoulder. Cold, just like an invisibility spell. Step. Step. Shudders wracked my body. Footsteps moved past me, and I whirled to follow. They step-stepped down the hallway and took what was left of my hope with them toward the front door, which opened with an invisible hand.
When I turned around again, the overturned poppies, the simple red flowers that reinforced the spells on this house, began to die.
12
Kason slammed the front door shut on the sound of retreating footsteps laced between the shrieking wind. Neither of us moved for the longest time, listening, waiting for something more to happen, wondering what the hell we were supposed to do now. But finally the chill in the house was too much to bear, and my teeth had about chattered down to the gums.
Kason propped his shotgun against the hallway wall. “I could try to leave. See what happens.”
“The poppies aren’t completely dead yet,” I said, but I wasn’t even sure that mattered.
What if the poppies died, but Kason still couldn’t leave and anyone, not just phantom footsteps, could come in? Whoever that had been had used an invisibility spell, a damn powerful one that also masked most of the fae stink. And how had they come in here in the first place? Had my family’s killer followed me from Hell Here back to Kason’s and shadowed me into the house? Just to kill the poppies? I supposed so since I had no other guesses. But why not just kill us?
After a quick sweep of the rest of the house to be sure we were alone—though if they were invisible, it was kind of hard to tell—Kason gently pulled me back to the couch in the living room.
“I would imagine it took quite a bit of magic to do that,” he said.
I sat while he paced, positioning myself so I could see as much of the house as possible since unease still scraped up and down my nerves. “That’s an understatement. Whoever that was had enough to block my magic, too.”
“So, they’ll need time to recuperate, right?” He shot a nervous glance toward the kitchen. “Before they…do whatever it is they’re planning?”
“That was only one set of footsteps we heard, and there are three Diamond Dogs, the man who killed my family, and whoever else they’ve drafted to help. Who knows how much time we have.” Before they killed us? Even though they’d already had the opportunity? I shook my head. “We need to get you out of this house. When those poppies are dead, we’re out of here.”
He stopped pacing and fixed me with a look that steamed up my insides. “And until then?”
I swallowed at the roughness in his voice. “Then…I guess we have 673 sex curses to try and break and hope that one of those was the one Daphne used on you.”
We got to it. Kason picked up Nasty to search once again for the curses and their cures while I eyed my atern. Twenty-one clicks of magic left. Twenty if I wanted to live. I might not live anyway if we didn’t cure Kason, or if I hadn’t already, and we both died in the act. Not a bad way to go, but not at all how I imagined, especially if we didn’t end fae power. And if I didn’t get revenge on my family’s murderer who’d been right here.
Three hours later, we’d made it through twenty-two cures and an in-depth discussion about public orgies involving unicorn horns and a boiled black orchid at midnight. One cure had called for a goat. I didn’t know any goats. Good thing, too, both for Kason and the goat. Another cure required the cursed being to take off his shirt and exist half naked for a while. Actually, no it didn’t. I made that one up just to see if Kason would do it. Thankfully, he did.
Kason sat on the couch next to me, fully clothed unfortunately, and scrolled through the rest of the curses and cures. “We need things we don’t have for the rest of these.”
“I could go out and get some of the things.” I glanced at my atern through the straw maze connected to a wine bottle tucked into my side. “Or I could use a little more magic, but…”
He shook his head. “The last time you went outside, you brought someone else back. It’s not safe out there.”
“You’re right.” But with the dying poppies, it wasn’t safe in here either. Since we’d started trying to break the curse, the poppies were already tinged a crispy black around the edges of the petals. No matter how many times we tried to right the overturned vase, nothing worked. It was as if they were giving up in defeat. They would be dead soon, allowing any number of fae to come right on in. And for Kason to leave. Hopefully.
He
aimed a remote from the coffee table at the stereo. The background classical music switched. Sudden loud, pulsing music jerked the maze straw from my mouth. He stood in front of me, offering his palm.
“Dance with me.”
“I…I can’t.” A nervous flutter pitched my voice higher. Were we doing this now? The sex? Or was this just dancing?
“Your legs aren’t cursed.” He propped a knee on the couch and nudged my hip as if to prove his point. “See? Take a break.”
“My hair’s still damp.” As soon as I said it, I chuckled at how lame I sounded, but the spark in Kason’s eyes faded it to a shaky exhale. What if he decided he didn’t want me again? What if this meant more to me than it did to him? What if it killed us? “What is this music?”
“Violent Femmes.” He set Nasty to the side and eased me to my feet with a gentle hand at my elbow.
“Violent Femmes? That sounds like it’s contagious.” I didn’t even remember agreeing to dance with him, yet there I stood in the living room while he put his arms around my waist and swayed us wildly back and forth in time to the music. My nerves iced up at his touch.
His laugh vibrated through his chest and into mine. “Just relax. Feel it.”
Oh, I felt it. Kason pressed his body against mine, holding me tight while he whirled me in crazy circles until I screeched. I clung to the only thing I could—the white flannel at his chest. And underneath it, his heart. That was what I wanted to hold on to, what I wanted to protect forever. If I couldn’t hold anything else with my self-imposed curse, that was the only thing worth holding. I feared sex with him would seal that feeling for an eternity. What if he didn’t want me after that? Or worse, what if it didn’t matter anyway because we were both dead?
I gazed up at him, a smile stuck on my face anyway, and he stopped swaying to the music, his eyes half shuttered as if he’d drunk too much Necromancer’s Piss.
“Thank you for opening the door for me that night,” I said because it seemed like it should be said.
Legacy: Faction 11: The Isa Fae Collection Page 12
